Given that the agrarian sector remains predominant in the
developing world, providing not only a significant portion of national
incomes but also absorbing the bulk of its labour, the issue of access
to land for cultivation purposes is a major economic issue with clear
livelihood implications. But there are also several other correlated
factors contributing to the reason access to land is considered
important, ranging from food security to environmental concerns, since
people who have a piece of their own land are not only better equipped
to meet their household nutritional needs, but are also likely to
utilise more sustainable agricultural practices if they have ownership
of the land they cultivate. (1)

Moreover, often landless people in rural areas also do not own the
land on which their homestead is located, which further increases their
vulnerability to exploitation. Nonetheless, inequality in land
ownership, in which a small minority owns vast tracts of land and many
others own very little or no land, remains a predominant feature across
the developing world, and it is in turn blamed for widespread poverty,
marginalisation and disempowerment. (2) Simultaneously, it is feared
that the phenomenon of globalisation is increasing the number of
displaced farmers, as more land is now being used for the large-scale,
commercial, export-led production of cash crops. In order to survive,
poor farmers often feel compelled to encroach on forest land and other
fragile environmental areas where the climate and soil do not permit
sustainable agriculture.

Despite these compulsions, altering land tenure arrangements to
provide poor people in rural areas of the developing world greater
access to land is a complex and politically difficult proposition. (3)
This is so because it is not uncommon to find a convergence of elite
interests (feudal, political and sometimes even military) with regards
to land use within developing countries; such is the case for example in
Pakistan. (4)

It is therefore not surprising that land reforms is such a
politically charged topic that even international development agencies
are reluctant to tackle head-on, instead often resigning themselves to
evoking global calls to national governments to help their rural masses
gain access to land. Prominent events that have drawn attention to the
issue of land reforms in this manner include the 1979 World Conference
on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, the 1992 Earth Summit, the
2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, and most recently the 2006
International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development. (5)

In principle, at least, the rights-based approaches to development
consider land redistribution a basic prerequisite for inclusive,
broad-based development. Access to land is legitimately considered a
basic human right, as it involves the right to feed oneself, the right
to adequate shelter and the right to employment. There are also economic
reasons for land reforms, as land monopolies act as an impediment to
productivity-enhancing investments. Redistribution of land can promote
equity as well, which makes land reforms important for promoting social
justice.

But the high costs attached to land redistribution are also
evident; the violence unleashed by agrarian revolts in
communist-inspired contexts, as in China, provides ample evidence to
this effect. Moreover, once the communist party took control of China,
it firmly brushed aside any aspirations of individual cultivation in
favour of collective farming. Collective farming was however abandoned
in China, as it has been in other former communist countries, due to its
inability to provide sufficient incentive for agricultural production.
Various forms of privatisation are instead being experimented with,
including handing back collectivised farms to their original owners, or
cultivators, or else making cultivators shareholders in the state-owned
farms. (6)

Other examples of state-led land reforms having gone astray can be
found in contemporary Africa, which the subsequent section will draw
further attention to. Nonetheless, it should now be evident that many
developing countries have at least tried to implement different types of
land reforms. Radical attempts have aimed to confer ownership not only
to the state, but also directly to poor farmers by implementing ceilings
(and floors) on land holdings and appropriating surplus land for
redistribution among the landless. More moderate attempts have also been
initiated for the express purposes of abolishing intermediaries or
providing security of tenure to sharecroppers. (7)

The success in terms of implementing these different types of land
reforms varies significantly from country to country, and also indicates
the need for land reforms to be accompanied by other supplemental
measures to support poor famers in becoming more productive. The
subsequent sections will take cognisance of land reform experiences from
around the developing world, including in particular South Asia. The
role of the World Bank, an influential external development stakeholder,
will also be highlighted in the process of trying to address skewed land
distribution through the creation of land markets, for instance, prior
to a reassessment of existing realities towards the conclusion of this
paper.

SUCCESS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA VERSUS SOUTH AMERICAN AND AFRICAN
FAILURES

Redistributive land reforms are acknowledged to have played an
important role in the rapid growth of South-East Asian countries like
South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia after World War II. (8) Yet the
experience of land reforms in other parts of Asia, and in most parts of
Africa and South America, has been less optimistic.

The uniqueness of national socioeconomic and political
circumstances cannot be ignored while discussing issues of land access
and redistribution imperatives. However, international experiences in
implementing land reforms do indicate the emergence of some common
themes which can be discussed at a broader level. For instance, in the
case of Latin American reforms generally (though to different degrees)
land reforms were impelled by populist demands for redistribution. While
land access to the landless was thus secured, these redistribution
attempts largely neglected supplemental policies required for land
redistribution to be economically productive. For instance, important
characteristics accompanying the South-East Asian land reforms (in South
Korea and Taiwan), such as family ownership, market-based compensation
for landowners and provision of secure land titles for the redistributed
lands, were absent in South America. (9) Moreover, the establishment of
responsive and transparent government institutions was an equally
important aspect of land reform in the South-East Asian context, which
remained largely missing in South America.

Thus, in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador,
large-scale land reforms did not have the desired productivity impact.
While agricultural production and standards of living initially
increased among peasant beneficiaries when land reforms occurred in the
1950s in countries like Bolivia, the lack of a rural credit market and
ineffective agricultural extension services, followed by inflation,
eventually eroded any gains. (10) The same problems have been
encountered more recently in Brazil. Due to a lack of supplemental
measures to help empower the rural poor, many large landowners responded
to the threat of land reform with large-scale evictions long before
governments were able to effectively implement laws aimed at tenant
protection or land reform. (11)

Still, all hope for land reform is not lost. There is an ongoing
reconsideration of land reform despite failed attempts in countries like
Bolivia. The renewed emphasis on land reform was instigated by a
populist resurgence that has put redistributive policies such as land
reform back on political agendas throughout the region. But the new
leadership in South America must now learn from the South-East Asian
experience, as well as from its own past failures, and realise that
often it is not the actual distribution that matters most, but rather
that the distribution be accompanied by other reforms such as provision
of agricultural extension services. Otherwise poor farmers are not able
to become productive and to cultivate the land allocated to them on a
sustainable basis.

While there is a conceptual consensus that land reforms contribute
to equity and growth, (12) the experience on the ground also indicates
that while they may alter sociopolitical hierarchies, they do not
necessarily dismantle them. In a number of African countries which have
experimented with land reforms over the past three decades, control of
land has been retained by existing powerful social groups, whereas
marginalised rural segments such as women and the landless poor have
been largely ignored. The Zimbabwean evidence confirms this finding, as
does the South African experience.

Zimbabwe's colonial legalisation of white farmer settlements
had resulted in racially skewed land distribution, and a dispossessed
black rural population confined to degraded and overcrowded communal
lands. The main justification for land reform in Zimbabwe has been the
repossession and redistribution of freehold land to achieve a more
equitable balance in land ownership, as well as to raise the economic
and social well-being of the African population, in order to redress
past wrongs and to address the consequences of colonial land practices.
Although the Zimbabwean government has been keen to encourage the
emergence of a black rural middle-class, radical land confiscation and
redistribution have lacked the required strategic depth, have been
haphazard at best, and have met with limited success. (13) The
consequences for the poorest rural people in this context has been
rather negative because the fast track land reform program caused large
numbers of farm workers to be fired; yet farm workers have not been
among the groups targeted to benefit from land reallocations. Moreover,
women, whose rights to land under customary law were weak, have also
failed to benefit proportionately from the fast track process. (14) The
data shows that well over eighty-five per cent of beneficiaries were
men, despite the prevalence in rural Zimbabwe of several million poor
households that do not include an adult male. (15)

In South Africa's case, the land redistribution policies have
been strongly influenced by the advice of the World Bank. The World Bank
tried to stimulate the creation of agrarian policies, adjusted to the
neo-liberal parameters by encouraging leasing, privatisation of state
farms and an increased focus on facilitating land transactions in the
case of South Africa as well as some South American countries including
Brazil, Guatemala and Colombia during the early 1990s. In South Africa,
the World Bank recommended an injection of state-subsidised purchasing
power to allow some black South Africans to purchase land in the
existing land market. However, no well-defined or coherent measures to
focus on women or the rural poor were proposed and thus critics
predicted that the World Bank's approach would eventually result in
a package of state subsidies to a class of black male rural capitalists.
(16) In fact, the South African government's populist
pronouncements on land reform resulted in a surge of waged labour
shedding, motivated by employers' fears of loss of control over
land, creating massive unemployment amongst poor landless agricultural
labourers. Evidence also indicates that the beneficiaries of land
redistribution lived in relatively wealthy rural households, while over
ninety-six per cent of poor households did not benefit from the land
reform program at all. (17) Thus, as in other countries where this sort
of a non-redistributive approach was tried, it too failed to solve the
problem of land access and poverty alleviation.

Both the African and the South American land reform experiences
indicate that attempts to redress gross imbalances in land ownership and
access through the radical sweep of the pen is not enough. Recreating
sustainable livelihoods on the land is a significantly more difficult
task. Moreover, evident misfits between land policy and rural
development emerge, where land reforms are pursued by a government
primarily as the means of redressing past injustices rather than as a
basis for creating sustainable rural livelihoods.

The South Asian experience will now be focused upon, first to
demonstrate how implementing land reforms can be a much more difficult
proposition when vested interests continue to subvert attempts to alter
skewed land ownership patterns, and thereafter to show how donor
initiatives, like those of the World Bank, also fail in providing any
other forms of meaningful opportunities to the landless and marginalised
poor.

THE SOUTH ASIAN EXPERIENCE

In every South Asian country, the largest category of rural poor
consists of landless, marginal farmers and tenants who cultivate land
mostly on a sharecropping basis. (18) However, since the elite in South
Asian societies always capture national resources, including land, any
serious attempt to tackle poverty that implies comprehensive structural
changes in land use and ownership is bound to face stiff
resistance--consider the case of Pakistan, in which half of all rural
households do not own any land, and the top five per cent own over a
third of all cultivated areas. (19) Despite similar historical contexts
surrounding the implementation of land reform programs in Bangladesh,
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, the governments of these countries
have adopted different approaches to tackling rural poverty through land
reforms, with mixed results.

Following independence from colonial rule, the newly formed states
of South Asia inherited non-productive governing elites focused
primarily on the maintenance of law and order and the preservation
(largely through patronage and bribes) of strategic alliances between
state bureaucrats and military officials, large landowners and powerful
members of an emerging industrial bourgeoisie. (20) The doling out of
land tenancies for services by the holders of imperial land had
historically been consolidated by Mughal emperors through the employment
of imperial administrators called zamindari to ensure the efficient
collection of taxes from the peasants. (21) As the lords of their
domains, the zamindari performed police, judicial and/or military duties
and held regular courts called zamindari adalat, where they extracted
fines, presents and perquisites. (22)

Under British rule, the system of zamindari was preserved by the
Raj, which accepted the authority of the local rulers of the
'princely states' as long as they demonstrated adequate
loyalty to the Empire. The zamindars under the British (a class of
landed gentry, some of whom were descended from royalty and who
sometimes referred to themselves as rajas or 'little kings')
would collect taxes, keep a small portion and transfer the bulk of the
collections to the British authorities. Proprietary rights over land
granted to cultivators by the Mughals were further eroded when the
British transferred land rights to the favoured zamindars, who further
subleased their tracts of land rather than investing in their holdings.
(23)

Although the zamindari system was abolished by law by most South
Asian governments following independence from the British in 1947, the
system often persists in practice, in present-day Pakistan for instance.
(24) This is so because despite repeated laws created to place ceilings
on land holdings, many large landlords succeeded in avoiding
confiscation of their lands in Pakistan. They did so by exploiting
lacunas in reform legislations which had prescribed land holding limits
for individuals rather than families, and many large landlords thus
simply transferred ownership of individually owned large estates to
their own family members. (25) Soon thereafter, with the advent of the
capital-intensive Green Revolution technology and mechanised farming,
focus shifted away from the need to redistribute lands, and in many
instances reversed gains made by earlier redistributive efforts.

Even though technology was proclaimed as being scale-neutral, just
the fact that it was costly made the distribution of gains from the
technology uneven, with the rich and prosperous farmers emerging even
richer owing to their ability to adopt it. Technology could have
benefited the poor farmers if land reforms, and subsequently land
consolidation, was completed before the introduction of the technology
and farming cooperatives had been formed to collectively invest in
securing technological implements. In the absence of such support the
small landowners simply found it uneconomical to cultivate the land, and
often sold their plots back to the richer farmers, and thus many small
landowners joined the stream of landless labourers, ensuring a steady
supply of cheap agricultural labour to work on the lands of richer
farmers. (26)

Throughout much of South Asia today, the lives of the poor continue
to be dominated by ruling clans whose powers are often derived from
inherited, exclusive rights to natural resources and alliances with
political and military elites. Deprived of the power to compete with
better-organised and more politically influential market forces, the
poor have severely limited access to sources of income, credit and
technology. Their relative lack of market information, business and
negotiating experience, and collective organisation further hinders
opportunities for advancement, while relatively underdeveloped social
and physical infrastructure increases their vulnerability to famine and
disease, especially in mountainous and remote areas. In addition to
having larger families with higher dependency ratios, lower educational
attainment and higher underemployment levels, poor households in rural
areas of South Asia also typically lack basic amenities such as a piped
water supply, sanitation and electricity. (27) Perhaps unsurprisingly
given this context, many policy interventions undertaken in South Asia
aimed at promoting agricultural development have failed to break the
lingering marginalisation of the poor.

In Pakistan, there is a convergence of elite interests, and power
(as mentioned above) continues to prevent any significant land
redistribution from taking place at all. Correspondingly, some examples
of land reform can be found in India that are conspicuously absent in
Pakistan. One such example is the legalisation of tribal land
settlements in the hill areas of Orissa--a state-led initiative that has
not only resulted in increasing the sense of ownership in the region,
but also in a notable improvement to local natural resource management.
(28) The much-studied 1970s land reforms of Kerala and West Bengal,
which abolished the landlord and tenant classes by banning tenancy in
paddy fields and household plots, had various impacts but are widely
acknowledged to have reduced inequalities in land ownership, caste and
income. (29)

More typically, however, the governments of both India and Pakistan
have directed their efforts away from the politically charged issue of
land reforms and concentrated on more manageable and palatable rural
issues, such as the cultivation and irrigation of usable land.
Nevertheless, the 'public good' nature of a natural resource
like land, provided that it is effectively owned, managed and
cultivated, and its potential for increasing agricultural productivity
and reducing rural poverty, cannot be overemphasised. (30)

The need to address problems of land ownership and management is
becoming all the more urgent as poor farmers in developing countries
struggle to compete with heavily subsidised agricultural products from
developed countries that are increasingly dominating both domestic and
global markets. Another similar pressure is the increasing prevalence of
genetically engineered high-yield seed varieties produced by
transnational agribusiness corporations, which is seen to be undermining
the use and preservation of indigenous seeds traditionally used by local
farmers, and in turn their food security.31 These issues are exacerbated
by the liberalisation policies pursued by international financial
institutions like the World Bank, whose particular role in tackling the
problem of landlessness merits special attention.

WORLD BANK PERSPECTIVES ON LAND REFORMS

Given its prominence in the provision of development aid to the
developing world, and its subjection of this aid to the condition of
pursuing prescribed reforms, the World Bank can play an instrumental
role in influencing land redistribution in countries with skewed land
holdings. However, the World Bank has shifted focus away from land
redistribution to encouraging collective ownership to be privatised,
using market mechanisms to improve land access, or else to improve
tenancy rights of sharecroppers. Various combinations of these reforms
are being carried out in various countries, from South Africa,
Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, to the Philippines,
Thailand, Indonesia, India and Pakistan. (32)

However, critics claim that the World Bank's obsession with
the establishment of land markets and market-assisted land reforms has,
more often than not, nullified even the best of its intentions to
redistribute land in many developing countries. In Brazil, for example,
under the World Bank scheme, loans and credits would be granted to the
landless to buy land at market rates from wealthy landowners and to
acquire fertilisers and technical assistance for new, marketable crops.
It has been pointed out that market-assisted reforms fail because they
place a heavy burden on poor people to repay expensive loans, often from
harvests from poor soils, as landowners often choose to sell the most
marginal and ecologically fragile plots that they own. Market-assisted
reforms are thus often viewed as an instrument for rewarding landlords
rather than for improving the livelihoods of the landless poor. (33)

Moreover, the World Bank acknowledges that existing land tenure
arrangements in South Asian countries like Pakistan are far from
sufficient in order to boost their agricultural production. But to
address this situation, the World Bank reiterates the need for measures
like rapid access and transparency of the land records, which it
presumes will give an impetus not only for investments in agricultural
production, but also for facilitating the process of transactions to
achieve efficient land use. The World Bank further argues that land
markets will provide a chance for the smallholders to turn their fixed
assets in the form of land into dynamic assets to be integrated in the
market.

To strengthen the case for its arguments, the World Bank recently
commissioned research to compare farming practices on rented and owned
land in rural Pakistan. While this research was not unique in making
this comparison, it did for the first time focus on investment
behaviour, and interestingly it has found that when contracts are
incomplete there is lesser investment on land due to the threat of
opportunistic expropriation or capital holdups caused by the inability
to transfer or sell land rapidly. Using data from households cultivating
multiple plots under different tenure arrangements, the paper shows that
land-specific investments are lower on leased plots, whereas greater
tenure security increases land-specific investment, even on leased
plots. (34) However, whether land records and transfers are adequate
measures to address problems like poverty remains debatable. Creating
land markets may just as easily enable more agribusinesses to enter
rural markets in developing countries and take over land from small
farmers, without offering many employment opportunities to the landless
agricultural labourers due to use of capital-intensive means of
production to maximise efficiency and profits.

If the aim of land reforms is to facilitate changes in land
ownership and occupational rights, such changes may alter income
distribution, social status and political power structure. But this
implies that national governments have to expropriate land holdings
above the ceiling and distribute these among the landless and the
marginal farmers free of charge, and provide these new owners with
adequate credit facilities so that they do not fall back into
indebtedness through borrowing from the same people who owned the land
previously. However, the model of land reforms being espoused by the
World Bank is in no way going to achieve these objectives, nor is it
going to mitigate the abject poverty of the landless and the marginal
farmers.

ASPIRATIONS VERSUS CURRENT REALITIES

The apparent failure of past land reforms is indicative of the fact
that large-scale land redistributions are often politically not
feasible. South Asia, for example, features an asymmetry between small
and large farmers in the political as well as the economic sphere. It is
access to political power that has been identified as a distorting
factor that upsets the functioning of land and water markets in South
Asia. (35) Land markets thus obviously cannot be studied in isolation
from political considerations. These evident distorting effects are not
only reflected in terms of infrastructure provision, but also in the
context of access to inputs, subsidies and support services. The
interaction here is complicated, because land is a source of political
power, and political power provides the means to enhance the return from
land, as well as to block attempts to reform the land market.36 Given
this sort of a nexus it is not surprising that advantages that large
farms enjoyed in the pre-reform agriculture sector can persist and
translate into more pronounced land concentration in the post-reform
era. Such policy distortions and market imperfections can create a bias
towards large farms, allowing them to persist as such despite their
inefficiency. Price policy and farm subsidies can also favour larger
farmers. Moreover, large inefficient farms persist because their owners
have little interest in profit maximisation. Land is instead held for
political power or prestige, as the cases of countries like Pakistan
demonstrate, where landlords are able to secure the votes of those
households who are dependent on them due to land tenure links, and use
these votes either to gain political power directly, or else to propel
their proponents to the legislatures.

Therefore, market-assisted reform cannot function without
deliberate policy interventions in favour of land purchases by the
poorest households. Such intervention is justified not only on equity
grounds, but also by the evidence that small farms are more efficient
than large ones. Thus it is necessary to remove all policies that favour
large farms (such as credit programs that require land as a deposit,
inappropriate taxation and subsidy, and marketing policies favouring
large farms) and to establish credit and rural construction programs
targeted specifically at the small farms of the rural poor. (37) Besides
supplemental interventions, the rural poor need legally secure
entitlements to assets, and opportunities to participate in
decentralised resource management, which has governance implications
such as the need for devolution of power (as mentioned above).

Reconsidering existing social relations is also imperative. In
order for land policy reforms to contribute more fully to poverty
reduction and sustainable development, they must also be closely related
to processes that empower poor men and women in decision making. After
all, poverty is not only the result of a lack of economic assets but
also a consequence of exclusion from political processes and access to
basic services. (38) Vulnerable groups, including women, minorities and
indigenous peoples are particularly prone to such marginalisation. There
is growing recognition of the intra-household inequality. Specifically,
women often face worse circumstances than men within the same household.
(39) Despite day-to-day agricultural decisions often being made by
women, they often lack formal rights to the land they manage. Women also
face a number of key constraints such as lack of access to equipment and
agricultural support services. Household duties or male-controlled plots
may have prior claim on their labour. There is also wage discrimination
against women in the market for hired labour. Land reforms cannot
succeed in addressing goals like social justice unless they address
gender equity concerns. Doing this is possible by ensuring that more
women are provided with land titles, and by compelling line departments
to ensure that women have access to inputs like seeds and fertilisers,
as well as by putting in place supplemental measures to facilitate their
access to agricultural markets.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Developing countries have attempted to initiate different types of
land reforms with varied degrees of success. These attempts have
included providing greater tenurial rights to sharecroppers, imposing a
ceiling on land ownership and distributing surplus lands among the
landless and poor peasants. Yet the basic structure of wealth and power
in society remains more or less the same. Moreover, since these land
reforms mostly tried to give land to the tiller, those not tilling land,
such as landless rural labourers or those with traditionally weak land
ownership status, like women, were not really helped by land reforms.

Now market-led reforms are emphasising the need for efficient
fixed-rent contracts to make life easier for sharecroppers, for example
by preventing their rotation by landowners who are fearful of allowing
them to till a piece of land permanently and thus become a threat.
However, World Bank-sponsored land transparency reforms will instead
encourage corporate farming and introduce a franchise agricultural
system, due to which millions of small landowners would be pushed aside,
and landless labour will be subjected to even more exploitation.

Land remains the most valuable asset for the rural masses in the
developing world, but mere access to it is not enough unless it is
accompanied by access to other essential inputs, such as agricultural
credit, fairly priced inputs, markets, training and effective extension
services. Unless land reforms are simultaneously redistributive and
comprehensive, production and incomes will not increase for the rural
poor, nor will land access become more evenly distributed on a
sustainable basis, despite lofty policy statements by postcolonial
states and the rhetoric of good intentions espoused by prominent
international aid agencies.

ENDNOTES

(1) Economic Commission for Africa, Land Tenure Systems and Their
Impact on Food Security and Sustainable Development in Africa, United
Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa, 2004,
http://www.uneca.org/eca_resources/publications/sdd/land_tenure_systems.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2010.

(12) The breadth of this consensus ranges from evidence presented
from Africa by multilateral agencies like the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa (ECA, 2004) to a range of individual scholars
drawing attention to these links from their own varied perspectives (for
example, see Deininger, 651).